obutu Sese Seko, Zaire's longtime dictator and the last of a
generation of Cold War rulers who grew fabulously rich by providing
a bulwark against communism, died in exile Sunday in Rabat,
Morocco, after a long battle with prostate cancer. He was 66.

Having held Zaire together for 31 years, Mobutu was chased from
power in May after a seven-month rebellion led by a lifelong
opponent, Laurent Desire Kabila. Throughout his rule, Mobutu swore
that he would never be known as a former president, but only as the
late president. In another characteristic boast, he often said that
before him there was no Zaire, and that his country would not
survive him either.

If Kabila's army of footsoldiers put a lie to Mobutu's first
claim, history ironically proved the second boast true. Hours after
Mobutu's own mutinous army fired on the cargo plane that he had
used to flee the country from his opulent palace in his native
village, Gbadolite, the victorious rebel leader proclaimed himself
president. In his first official act, Kabila renamed the country
the Congo, restoring the name used by Belgian colonists and changed
by Mobutu in 1971.

Mobutu's panicked flight into exile was merely the beginning of
a humiliating end for a man whose almost constant presence at the
front and center of the African political stage had turned him into
one of the world's most vainglorious leaders. France, Mobutu's
close ally until the bitter end refused to give him asylum.
Similarly, Togo, a West African state ruled by another longtime
dictator, Gnassingbe Eyadema, asked Mobutu and his large entourage
of family and aides to leave the country just days after the exiled
leader landed there.

Finally, Morocco, another ally, took Mobutu in. For most of his
four months there, the longtime dictator's failing health kept him
confined to hospitals.

After seizing power in a 1965 coup, Mobutu formed one of the
continent's archetypal one-party states, tolerating no dissent and
encouraging a strong personality cult. The chosen symbols of his
power became a trademark leopard-skin cap and wooden walking stick,
carved with the figure of an eagle at the top.

Under the banner of an ideology dubbed "authenticity," and
later simply known as Mobutuism, he sought to legitimize his rule
by reawakening pride in values supposedly unique to Africans, all
the while enhancing his own power as the country's undisputed
chief.

He built his political longevity on three pillars: violence,
cunning, and the use of state funds to buy off enemies. His
systematic looting of the national treasury and major industries
gave birth to the term "kleptocracy" to describe a reign of
official corruption that reputedly made him one world's wealthiest
heads of state.

Bernard Kouchner, a minister in the government of former France
President Francois Mitterrand, referring to Mobutu's wealth,
estimated by some to be as great as $5 billion, once described the
African leader as "a walking bank vault with a leopard-skin cap."

Mobutu's rapid rise from obscurity, beginning at the outset of
his country's chaotic independence from Belgium, was also due in no
small part to the help of Washington and other Western powers who
saw in him a valuable ally against instability and Communist
encroachment in Central Africa.

Playing this strategic card to the hilt, Mobutu allowed his huge
country, which borders nine other African nations, to be used as a
staging ground for supporting Western client states and
anti-Communist guerrilla movements throughout the region, most
notably next door in oil-rich Angola.

By the same token, Mobutu was able repeatedly to call on his
Western allies to help put down the rebellions that have almost
continuously marked his country's history after independence.

Mobutu's aid in the effort to contain Soviet influence in
Africa, and his country's status as a repository of immense mineral
wealth earned the Zairian leader direct contacts -- unmatched by any
other leader of black Africa -- with every American president from
Dwight Eisenhower to George Bush.

Only late in the Bush administration did Washington officially
begin to shun Mobutu, denying him visas to visit the United States,
and encouraging him to organize free national elections.

Mobutu had managed to outlast a stern generation of famously
wealthy, rightist dictators who ruled over much of the developing
world throughout the Cold War, from the Duvaliers of Haiti to
Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.

But by the 1990s, with much of Africa and the rest of the world
swept up in a new spirit of democratic politics, Mobutu's
traditional Western backers had begun to see him as an embarrassing
dinosaur.